Olivia DrakeTo help the victims of the March 11, 2011 earthquake in Japan, Wesleyan graduate students Maho Ishiguro, Akiko Hakateyama, Ellen Loeck and Shoko Yamamoto arranged a benefit concert titled "Voices United." Students and faculty from Wesleyan's music department, and resident performers from the Middletown area, assembled at Crowell Concert Hall for an afternoon of music and dance performances. The concert was filmed and will be available on DVD this month. Eleven performances, which included different genres of music from 10 countries, were featured. Participating ensembles and musicians included Chinese Ensemble, Balinese Gender Ensemble, Carnatic Music Ensemble (Indian vocals), The Mixolydians (vocal ensemble singing Rennaisance madrigals), Slavei…
Jorge Arévalo Mateus, a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology, received a grant award from the GRAMMY Foundation. Mateus was selected to be an archives and preservation consultant at the Liborio Mateo's Calvary in the Dominican Republic. He will oversee unique recordings of primary source of the musical, celebratory, religious and domestic events at the Calvary. These rare recordings comprises sacred and festive music, rituals, liturgies, interviews and daily life at this important pilgrimage center. These field recordings took place from 2000 to 2006 through close work with Reyna Jimenez. Reyna was keeper of the Calvary for forty years, until her death in 2008.
Sumarsam, the University Professor of Music, was named one of the 50 "successful" Indonesians in the United States by the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia in 2012. In collaboration with the Indonesian Consulate General in the U.S., the Embassy is publishing a book titled Secret of My Success: 50 Prominent Indonesian[s] Share Their Lessons on Life and Remarkable Career[s]. Sumarsam will contribute a 3,000 word essay for the publication. The goal of the book is to inspire Indonesian communities in the U.S. At Wesleyan, Sumarsam teaches Indonesia music and theater, focusing on the performance, history and theory of gamelan and…
This issue we ask “5 Questions” of Eric Charry, associate professor of music. Charry, an expert on African music, is currently directing the Ethnomusicology and Global Culture Summer Institute at Wesleyan. Q: Professor Charry, as an associate professor of music, what are your areas of musical expertise and what classes do you teach at Wesleyan? A: Most of my research and writing until recently has been in the area of African music, specifically, the West African region where Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea and Mali meet. I spent two years in the region learning to play the kora (harp), balafon (xylophone), and…
Eric GershonA Ph.D candidate and six recent graduates received Fulbright Fellowships for the 2011-12 academic year. Aaron Paige, a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology, has received a Fulbright Fellowship to support his dissertation fieldwork in Malaysia, as well as a research grant from the Society for Asian Music to support research in Chennai, India. The dissertation project, “From Kuala Lumpur to Kollywood: Music, Language, and Identity in Tamil Solisai,” involves multi-sited ethnography and will trace the various meanings of Tamil hip-hop as it travels within and between local, national, and transnational spaces. Paige's work will take him to Chennai in the summer…
Po-wei Weng, a Ph.D. candidate in Wesleyan’s ethnomusicology program, has won a $15,000 grant to support his dissertation work on a popular Taiwanese Puppet television series. Competing with applicants from all disciplines and many top colleges in the United States, Weng was this year the only person from the music studies field to win an award from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. His dissertation project is "Music, Technology, and Mediated Modernity: Soundscape of Pili Budaixi in Taiwan." Currently in Taiwan, Weng returns to Middletown in August.
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Sumarsam, University Professor of Music, is the author of the essay, "Past and Present Issues of Islam within the Central Javanese Gamelan and Wayang," published in Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia by Oxford University Press, pages 45-79, in 2011. According to the abstract: "Sumarsam's contribution to the volume addresses Islam in the context and development of the Javanese gamelan and wayang kulit shadow play. The chapter uniquely combines the interpretation of primarily Javanese and European texts, the author's personal experience as teacher, performer, and practitioner of gamelan and wayang kulit, and a assessment of the public attitudes of…
Sumarsam MA '76, University Professor of Music, participated in an ethnomusicology panel during the State of Indonesian Studies Conference April 28 at Cornell University. Sumarsam spoke on "Javanese Music Historiography: The Lost Gamelan of Gresik." The interdisciplinary conference focused on Indonesia's anthropology, art history, history, language, government and ethnomusicology. Marc Perlman MA '78, Ph.D. '94, associate professor at Brown University; Martin Hatch '63, MA'69, associate professor at Cornell University; Kaja McGowan '82, associate professor at Cornell; and Christopher Miller MA '02, a Wesleyan ethnomusicology Ph.D. candidate, also participated in the conference. The conference was hosted by Cornell's Southeast Asian Program.…
Wesleyan's Music Department held a Student Steelband Concert Dec. 9 in Usdan University Center. Eric Charry, associate professor of music, directs the Trinidadian steelband and class. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei05GzyB5iw[/youtube] (more…)
Music department doctoral students presented papers at the Society for Ethnomusicology's annual convention in Los Angeles, Nov. 10-14. The students presented were Hae-joo Kim, Aaron Paige, Jorge Arevalo Mateus Po-wei Weng, and Min Yang. Kim, Paige and Weng were on a panel chaired by the Rochard K. Winslow Professor of Music Mark Slobin, on global film music analysis.
Ethnomusicology Ph.D candidate Jorge Arévalo Mateus’ musical score and sound collage for Native artists James Luna’s (Luiseño) installation, “Chapel for Pablo Tac,” was recently acquired by the Smithsonian Institution-National Museum of the American Indian, as part of the museum’s permanent collection of contemporary art. The multimedia work will appear in the upcoming exhibition Vantage Point: The Contemporary Native Art Collection, in Washington, D.C., Sept. 25 to Aug. 7, 2011. Arévalo Mateus describes the work as a “composite of historical and contemporary source musical elements brought together to sonically demonstrate and elucidate Luna’s ritual of renewal.” He adds, “the ‘compositional process’ was…